Law Commons^™

Rethinking Copyright Harmonization, Clark Asay

Indiana Law Journal

For nearly half a century, the United States has been one of the main proponents of harmonizing the world’s copyright laws. To that end, the U.S. government has worked diligently to persuade (and, in some cases, bully) most of the world’s countries to adopt copyright standards that resemble those found in the United States. The primary reason for this push to harmonize the world’s copyright laws is simple: the United States has long been a net exporter of copyrighted works, and so the U.S. government has sought to ensure that other countries provide U.S. authors with the same economic rights …

A Technological Theory Of The Arms Race, Lee Kovarsky

Indiana Law Journal

Although the "technological arms race" has recently emerged as a vogue-ish piece of legal terminology, scholarship has quite conspicuously failed to explore the phenomenon systematically. What are "technological" arms races? Why do they happen? Does the recent spike in scholarly attention actually reflect their novelty? Are they always inefficient? How do they differ from military ones? What role can legal institutions play in slowing them down?

In this Article I seek to answer these questions. I argue that copyright enforcement and self-help represent substitutable tactics for regulating access to expressive assets, and that the efficacy of each tactic depends on …